Going to a strange land is sometimes the same as going home. Visiting mountain gorillas in Uganda made me feel like a young boy again.
My journey to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park — one of the most evocative names of a national park of which I am aware — was organized by Africa Tours Adventure with offices in Kampala. Levan and I started on February 9th from Entebbe. He picked me up — I was the only safari guest — at my lovely little hotel, The Okra House. Hours later, we crossed the Equator, where we stopped to watch a fun and quick demonstration of centrifugal forces. Hours later still we made it to Bakiga Lodge in Ruhija, just outside Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. (Bakiga is the name of the local people, one of 56 distinct tribes in Uganda. The lodge is part of a local NGO sponsoring safe drinking water projects in the community.) The mountains were shrouded in mist, and eerily quiet. We spent the night with one other visiting American and his guide in the big lodge. I did not sleep well. (See “The Practical & Theoretical” sidebar below for more information.
There is a scene in the 1988 film by Micheal Apted, Gorillas in the Mist in which we see Dian Fossey following her equally inexperienced gorilla tracker. She is just days into arriving in Africa but is already frustrated by the failure to find any trace of mountain gorillas — the very purpose for which she abruptly left her life in the US. Vocalizing her frustration — as the very vocal Fossey was wont to do — she gets distracted, slips and falls. She exclaims, “Great! I have landed in shit!” They quickly realize that the shit is fresh, and large — and from a Silver Back Gorilla! Soon Fossey is glimpsing her first mountain gorillas.
In a different park, in a different nation, in a different century, excrement would also be my beacon to the mountain gorillas.
The Practical & the Theoretical
PRACTICAL
The Uganda Wildlife Authority, (UWA) manages 10 National Parks; 12 Wildlife reserves; five Community Wildlife Management Areas; and 13 Wildlife Sanctuaries.
For more on Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, click here.
GO
Africa Tours Adventure
Nicholas and Levan were great travel partners. Visit during the two dry seasons of June – September and December – February.
The road from Kampala to Bwindi takes you across the Equator (going North to South). Make sure that you stop at the Equator when you pass into the Southern Hemisphere. You don’t need a lot of time but you’ll witness a fun demonstration.
While in Kampala, make sure that you take a tour with Nasser of Kampala City Trekkers. You’ll visit the National Mosque, taxi park, Owine Market, and a lot more. Nassir is a lot of fun.
STAY
Bakiga Lodge, near the park entrance, is spacious, serves good food, and helps the community with a local drinking water project.
In Entebbe, home to Uganda’s only international airport in Uganda., Gloria & Rebecca will treat you well at The Okra House. I stayed a week.
In Kampala, I stayed at the Jarin Hotel, full service near Makereie University and at the more-hostel-ly and more centrally located Acacia Villa. I found both on Booking.com
THEORETICAL
Learn about the Gorilla families in
Bwindi. There are eight habituated families in the Park.
The American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has a great Hall of African Mammals. named after Carl Akeley. This was a special place for me as a boy. Akeley was a promiscuous taxidermist and more: apparently he killed a leopard with his bare hands. He is also credited with successfully petitioning the King of Belgium, Albert I, to create the first national park in Africa. Albert was successor to Leopold II who personally owned the Congo and was a monster. Read King Leopold’s Ghost or watch the documentary on Amazon Prime to learn more about the European rape of Africa.
A more pleasant watch is Gorillas in the Mist before your trek and read this New York Times article before watching GITM. You will appreciate the authenticity of the film a great deal more if you do.
Mukiza & his family have some cinematic cred as well; start just after minute 14 on this great YouTube video.
Youtube also hosts a wonderful 45 minutes documentary, The Impact of Man vs Gorillas.
Visit the World Wildlife Fund’s gorilla fact sheet: WWF 10 gorilla facts.
Click here for the scoop on gorilla poop.
For more information on Dian Fossey, visit The Gorilla Fund.
The Gorilla Fund provides a list of recommended reading and viewing to help you get the most out of your gorilla experience.
Have a question, suggestion or comment? Go to “Leave a reply” below to share yours. I’ll be sure to answer.
I woke up at 6am the next morning nervous. Gorillas are huge and powerful. They are wild. Select families or groups have been habituated to human behavior but they are by no means tame animals. I have a healthy respect for all wild things and I kept thinking, “No gorilla has ever been habituated to me! The other American in the lodge the night before endorsed my reasons to be fearful. “This is a crazy thing to do!”, he said.
Levan took me to the park entrance at 7:30am and we gave a ride to the chief warden on our way. He and his crew would decide which of several families I would be assigned to track. One group is generally close to the entrance (there are no roads), another far, away, and the final the middle group, in-between the two. Levan told me that there was no difference in terms of the experience of encountering the gorillas. Travelers who like to plan more than I do might want to do some research in advance about a family or group of choice. Check out this site if you do:
The Trekkers
I would be the only guest tracking that day. Levan would not join me. Only eight people are allowed so it makes sense not to have your guide accompany you. We were not a particularly small group, nonetheless. My party consisted of eight homo sapiens, four machettes, two machine guns, and one walking stick. (I was entrusted with the walking stick.) I was accompanied by John, one of the assistant wardens in the Park, two armed guards, and a porter; the three trackers were ahead of us, having gone out to scout at first light. They had walked to where the gorillas had nested the night before.
As a way of supporting the community, I hired a porter from the community. When a young woman handed me a walking stick and asked for my bag, I almost said, “Thanks for the walking stick but I’m waiting for my porter to take my bag.” I quickly realized that Judith was not the “walking stick attendant” but my porter. She is a beautiful young woman with three daughters 9, 7, and 2, Rebecca, Anna, and Juliet. She had not been hired as a poster since March of 2020. You definitely want a walking stick and a glove on your hand to grasp it.
I was dressed in a long-sleeve shirt (also recommended), long pants (a must), a sun hat (although it was not a sunny day), and a pair of regular ankle-high waterproof boots. I started with a rain jacket but discarded it as I built up a sweat from the 6k walk. (Still, at an elevation of 7000 feet, the morning was cool and the weather can be cold and rainy. There are snow-capped mountains in Uganda at Rwenzori Mountains National Park, about 60 miles north.)
We hiked up, down, along ridges. We hiked in thick forest, and in tall grass. We hiked in mist. All the time I was reminding myself that wild as gorillas are, they are also intelligent. They know I mean no harm. I had been told by Levan that one of his last guests had been nudged aside by the Silver Back. I don’t know if “nudge” is the right word to use when referring to a 400-pound dominant gorilla brushing past you but the guest was no worst off. I had been told, both to stand my ground if a gorilla approaches as well as to back away. Rather than trying to resolve the discrepancy and get more clarity, I decided to just hope that no gorilla would advance toward me. I don’t recommend that to readers.
After about an hour of hiking with John communicating with the trackers by radio, he pointed to a pile of excrement on the gourd. He looked up at me, told me what we were staring at, and said, “Now I guarantee that you will see mountain gorillas!” My heart was beating fast from the hiking but it skipped a beat at those words.
We then left our well trod trail for the first time, we were soon with the three trackers. “They are there,” one of the trackers said. (I love how Ugandans pronounce there.) We had come upon our target, the Mukiza Group of habituated mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Mukiza broke away from a larger group when its Silver Back died suddenly in 2016 and an immigrant SB took over a part of the family. (While this sounds bad, splitting a family doubles the genetic diversity of the resulting offspring because only the dominant SB breeds with the females.)
Next, we had another briefing (“briefing is a popular word on safari.) I was told to leave my walking stick with Judith. (I did not want to.) She would not be going further! (I wanted her to come and I think act like a body guard.). The guards with the machine guns were also to stay behind. What was happening? I was told that I needed to keep a distance of 10 meters. There were only two times I was ten meters away from the Mukiza Group of mountain gorillas: the first was when I was arriving and the second was as we left I was as close as six feet.
The Gorillas
Earlier I mentioned Gorillas in the Mist. There is a scene which follows the one I noted above in which the camera does a slow close-up of Fossey, played by the wonderful Sigourney Weaver. It captures her as she gazes for the first time on mountain gorillas in the wild. Her eyes grow wide, tears well, the mouth falls agape. Fossey is quiet for the first time in the film. It is not a solemn silence but a joyful one. Of course, I had no camera crew with me to record my reaction so I cannot describe my expression of astonishment and gratitude in physical terms. But I was also transfixed. “Oh my God,” “Oh my God”, “Oh my God,” I repeated as I watched a mountain gorilla feeding herself in a deliberate but nonchalant way six feet away. Even more astonishing; her four-month-old baby clung to her back and gazed back at me. All the unease I had felt vanished as quickly as the gorillas had appeared.
These two were almost hidden in the thick brush and soon I realized that other members of the group were doing the exact some thing — eating with a determination that left no account of me. (Gorillas have never been seen drinking, by the way. It is assumed they receive enough hydration through their fruit-foward diet) One gorilla and then another would breach the tall thick underbrush — or one of my guides would hack away at the underbrush as he did to reveal my first pair), feed for a while, and then disappear back into the ocean of green. I moved with the trackers and never once was there a concern about our distance. Mother and child passed us by, a male juvenile sat nearby. The Silver Back, Mukiza, “The Healer” kept his distance. In all we saw at least ten of the family of fifteen. (There are over 400 gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, roughly half of the wild population in the world, all in east-central Africa.)
Connecting to wild gorillas was, for me, not to discover that the apes I was trekking cared at all about me. It is seeing that they seem emphatically to not care at all. That indifference led me out of an anthropomorphic way of thinking. These creatures are not background for a selfie.. Gorillas just don’t care. The young were curious, sure. But as we humans say, when I was young I did foolish things. To Mukazi I was foolishness. He was focused on the business of eating and managing this family.. I think I rather liked it that way as well.
Memory
When I returned to the Lodge — by 1pm — I showered, changed clothes, and took a seat on my porch overlooking the misty mountain valley. I recounted the morning in my mind. I was tired — but not only because the hike is certainly a moderate challenge. I was tired because the encounter was an emotional one. Seeing our close cousins, being so close to this rare, magestic species was stirring. The curiosity of the youngest ones aongside with the complete indifference of the adults was both exciting and humbling. Mukiza and this family moved me. Soon I found myself thinking of a passage by Norman McLean. In A River Runs Through It, he writes of how “all existence fades to a being with [his] soul” and “eventually, all things merge into one.” That was how it felt for me to visit the mountain gorillas. At the moment of encounter, my nervousness faded, my exhaustion faded. I became one soul watching other souls, who massive bodies were close enough to touch and who visages were nearly human. The hour did not race by nor linger time seemed to have faded as well like a mist.
Post-card
As I sat drinking a banana gin martini (ask for one), I remembered the gorilla exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I have stood in front of that diorama many times. The three gorillas displayed were “collected” by Carl Akeley over a hundred years ago in the Congo near Mount Mikenos, which could qualify as one of Colorado’s Fourteeners. Mikenos, seen above, is, a dormant volcano in the Virunga Mountains and lies almost on the Equator. This range crosses Rwanda as well before entering Uganda. I checked my phone: those mountains are a mere 30 or so miles away from where I had encountered Mukiza just hours earlier. I recalled the date that mountain gorillas first came into my consciousness as a boy. I know the date of my visit because my mother made me a gift of a dozen giant postcards from the Museum gift shop. I scrawled the date on the back of one at the time and more recently I had taken pictures of those postcards so I checked on my laptop: I bought one of a grizzly bear (labeled a brown bear in those days,) a moose, a blue whale, some dinosaurs and an eagle. The only post-card of an animal from Africa that I collected that February day in 1966 as a boy of eight was the mountain gorilla.
